Arthur Walters, M.D.

Professor of Neurology

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Arthur S. Walters, M.D. completed his medical degree at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, his Neurology Residency at Downstate Medical Center Brooklyn, NY and subsequently his Movement Disorder Fellowship at the Neurological Institute, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, NY, NY. He served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Neurology at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and then as full Professor of Neuroscience at the Seton Hall University School of Graduate Medical Education, both in New Jersey, from 1998-2008. In 2008 he joined the Vanderbilt faculty as Professor of Neurology and as Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Sleep Disorders Center.

In 2008 Dr. Walters was given a distinguished faculty medical license from the state of Tennessee. Dr. Walters also received the 2010 American Academy of Neurology Sleep Science Award for excellence in sleep research. His biography is also listed in the major textbook of sleep medicine by Kryger, Roth, and Dement, for "Pioneers and Thought Leaders in Sleep Medicine."

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Originally trained in Movement Disorders and secondarily in Sleep Disorders, Dr. Walters has focused his career and research on the sleep-related movement disorders. He co-edited the first book on sleep-related movement disorders in 2003. He was chosen by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to head up the committee for formulating the new diagnostic clinical criteria for the sleep-related movement disorders (International Classification of Sleep Disorders 2005) and the committee for formulating the new polysomnographic scoring criteria for the sleep-related movement disorders (The AASM Manual for the Scoring of Sleep and Associated Events 2007).

From 1992-1998 he helped found and was the first chair of the Medical Advisory Board of the Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation (RLSF), a nation-wide support group for RLS patients and their families. He then served as an active member of the board for a number of years thereafter. From 1993 to 2007 he founded and served as the first chair of the International Restless Legs Syndrome Study Group, comprised of over 130 physicians and scientists from 17 countries dedicated to research on Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) and Periodic Limb Movements in Sleep. Under his leadership, universal clinical criteria for the diagnosis of RLS were established and the first validated scale for the scoring of RLS severity was created and validated. This scale is now used as the primary outcome measure in all the major pharmaceutical company studies of RLS.

In the academic year 2003/2004 he was named “Researcher of the Year in Medicine” for Seton Hall University, one of 4 such awards given by the University that year for excellence in research in (1) Medicine, (2) The Arts, (3) The Humanities, and (4) the Social and Physical Sciences.